Insistent
by ariescelestial
Summary: Don't cry. Someone dear to you has just died.


She's been missing Zack for so long that she stops noticing until one dreary afternoon. It starts to drizzle, and she feels the wind ruffle her ribbon as though it were a hand, and then she pauses, realizing just whose touch it feels like. She rises and clasps her hands, praying, hoping, _no, save him_—

"_Someone dear to you has just died. His spirit was coming to see you, but he already returned to the planet."_

She spoke those words once to her adopted mother, and that was one of those few times when she didn't see Elmyra as "Mom", because the woman had pulled away from her, cut to the quick. Just as Aerith feels, staring up into that rainy sky, the Planet murmuring to her of someone dear who'd been coming to see her, now lying dead, just beyond Midgar's borders. And for the first time she can truly empathize with what Elmyra had felt, as the girl pulls sharply from the soothing tones of a messenger that only brings tragedy.

But it's much easier to deny the words of a little girl than the swell of the Planet you walk on, the voices you have always known. She doesn't know how to deal with this grief—it had been five years, hasn't she already grieved for a lost relationship?—and she shouldn't worry her mother, no, she won't, so grief and guilt wind through her, subtle but insistent, until she finds herself watching a pipe leaking mako energy with no particular thought except that it was quiet, not a whisper to hear. Mako is drained from the Planet, tortured and contorted until it loses its voice and becomes docile enough for anyone to use without being asked anything in return. Perfectly convenient for people living on this Planet, and hellish for the Planet itself.

She wonders for a moment why the mako overflowed the pipe so—probably just a defect in the pipe, and yet she half-wants to believe that the Planet kept something of itself, even in this consumable, dead form. And so she watches the overzealous flow of mako, and thinks briefly to a youth with boundless energy and mako eyes, always eager to help without asking much in return—

Aerith's face is still calm, composed as she rises and walks away from her thoughts, towards the street. It's time to sell flowers and go about her normal routine and not worry about the only person she actually felt like a normal woman with, nor the fact that his body might be (_is, _the Planet insists) rotting somewhere near city limits, his soul drained from the earth and processed, still being yanked back and forth by Shinra after his employment had been terminated.

In an odd way, she's almost grateful for the explosion when it happens. The feeling evaporates soon after, when she realizes the hurt it's caused—but for that moment, she's awake and _aware_ and when she spies a blond SOLDIER fleeing the scene, she sees him and not Zack. Which is good, because just as he says "Don't see many flowers around here", she catches the mako blue eyes and the way he holds himself and it's all she can do to set her shoulders straight and walk away and _not _leave her fingers lingering on his after he takes her blossom.

That night she doesn't dream; she only stares up into the darkness of her room, needled by endless questions of the blond man and the reactor explosion and Zack and could the two men possibly be, could they possibly be related somehow?

Buried in the pile is trivial curiosity: _I wonder what he did with the flower._

She makes her way to the church in the dawn's glow, her steps leaving long shadows, and this time when the Planet whispers she listens, letting the voices wash through her as her fingers dig through dirt, tending to the plants that grow here and only here.

And she does not know this now, but high above her, on the plate, a blue-eyed blond mercenary freezes for a split-second. He'll tell her later that he's never frozen up so badly before or since, and then he'll smile Zack's smile and say "but it turned out for the better" and she'll wonder if it really was _just _a coincidence_, _or if Zack had somehow told him that falling would be okay, that if he let himself fall he'd see something—maybe even _someone_—special.

But for now he freezes for that one instant, and minutes later, when the explosion hits and his grip is too weak to hold on, he falls—

And Aerith _shrieks_, nerves effectively rattled, because even if she's seen this once before it's still not every day that a stranger just plummets through the roof and hits the ground hard enough to bounce back up before lying there as though dead. She's backed into a pew, hand over mouth, before she realizes that this is the same man she saw the day before, and there's a pang of regret and disappointment that has her fingers curling at the neck of her jacket before she gasps. "He moved!" Just the slight jerk of his foot, but as she watches, he shifts more and more, still alive and apparently restless.

And on an impulse, her lips purse before give a tentative call: "Hello, hello?"

The blond twitches, trying to sit up in response, even though his body's not quite ready for it. But the attempt encourages her.

"Hello, hello!" It's a wake-up call to herself, too.

_Don't cry. Someone dear to you has just died._

There's still heartache, and yet, as he sits up and brushes his oddly spiky hair back, stands just so…

_His spirit was coming to see you, but he already returned to the planet._

Time and death bedamned, Zack insists on returning to see her. She has to find out what happened to him.


End file.
